David Copperfield’s Homes Have the Magic Touch

The magician brings his passion for story-telling to his multimillion-dollar properties, incorporating arcade games, a collection of artists’ mannequins and an under-construction ‘secret jungle village’

CRASH. One minute I’m sitting in a chair, and the next I’m on the floor, staring up at the soaring ceiling of David Copperfield’s Manhattan penthouse. The magician has pulled a hidden string to topple the 100-year-old “surprise chair” I was sitting in.

“And what’s missing is you put a bullet there so it pops, and BAM! You get a big bang,” said the 60-year-old gleefully. Perched atop a 57-story Manhattan high-rise, the sprawling four-level apartment Mr. Copperfield shares with his fiancée, Chloe Gosselin, is brimming with vintage curiosities he has collected and restored.

Additional pieces from his collection are on display, he said, at his 11-island Bahamas retreat and his new home in Las Vegas, which Mr. Copperfield bought for $17.55 million in June, setting a local price record. Mr. Copperfield, who is currently in residence at the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino David Copperfield Theater in Las Vegas, declined to discuss his earnings, but his net worth is estimated by Forbes to be around $800 million.

At all of his homes, Mr. Copperfield said he aims not just to decorate, but to create immersive experiences. It is the same principle behind his magic, which features elaborate, often televised illusions like “vanishing” the Statue of Liberty. “My magic isn’t just making things disappear,” he said. “It’s a story-based magic, to really move people emotionally. When I started creating environments, it was the exact same thing.”

The first floor of Mr. Copperfield’s Manhattan apartment is devoted to antique arcade games. In the dimly lighted space—the windows are shrouded by black curtains—Mr. Copperfield bounded from game to game. “This guy’s great,” he said of “Jumbo the Fortune Teller,” a gowned elephant in a glass box. He inserted a penny into the slot, and the elephant whirred to life, using its trunk to select a fortune from the pages of a book.

After paying $7.4 million for the roughly 10,000-square-foot Manhattan apartment in the late 1990s, the magician said he spent five years furnishing it, “finding all this cool stuff to kind of give it a personality, a life.” That included removing the first-floor walls and bathrooms to make room for his arcade games, most of which date from the early 1900s.

He said he spent close to $1 million restoring the intricate devices, using the original catalogs to re-create the marquees and signage. Beside each game is a glass of coins from the appropriate era to feed into the machines’ slots, including English coins for the English games.

A floor above, the stark white living room’s walls are unadorned except for Mr. Copperfield’s collection of early 20th-century artists’ mannequins, which cover the wall above the fireplace like a swarm of ants. One appears to be swinging from the chandelier.

“Instead of having paintings, I have what the painters used to paint,” he said. He also uses the figures to help him display his collection of what he calls “hazing devices,” used by fraternal organizations around the turn of the 20th century. In addition to the “surprise chair,” there is an exploding table, stairs that turn into a slide and water guns that shoot backward into the user’s face.

While most of the games are in the arcade, the ones Mr. Copperfield finds especially beautiful have made their way upstairs. In one corner of the living room is a strength-tester game in the form of a larger-than-life cast-iron statue of boxer Jack Johnson.

An upstairs library displays sideshow curiosities such as a stuffed and mounted “fur-bearing trout,” and oil paintings of dogs dressed as humans. The paintings’ creator “was a fine artist, but he chose to have a sense of humor,” Mr. Copperfield said. “I love the idea of someone with extreme talent choosing a path that makes people feel happiness.” On the top floor, next to the entrance to a massive roof deck, a carved wooden horse emerges from the foliage beside an indoor swimming pool. The pool is empty; these days, Mr. Copperfield said, he is rarely in Manhattan.

Mr. Copperfield spends most of his time in Las Vegas at his contemporary eight-bedroom Summerlin home, which has its own nightclub. Now that he has moved in, he said he is in the process of “putting some personality into it.” He has decorated the bar area with vintage arcade games, for example. The living room displays a giant hippo head from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and instead of paintings, he said, he has televisions showing a video loop of footage from Coney Island in the early 20th century.

He has also turned a subterranean garage, designed to fit about 25 cars, into an arcade. Unlike the one at his New York home, this space is focused on newer games, such as skeeball and bowling, from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. It is “less museum-like and more playable,” he said. He even outfitted the space with a 1960s Good Humor truck, which can still be used to serve ice cream.

Mr. Copperfield spends about 10 weeks a year at his Bahamas compound, which he calls “Musha Cay and the Islands of Copperfield Bay.” He said he bought the bulk of that property in 2006 for about $55 million, then gradually added several smaller islands. When his family isn’t using it, the property functions as a resort. Rates start at $39,000 a day with a four-night minimum.

Musha Cay, with a staff of about 40, has five waterfront guesthouses, a movie theater on the beach and a billiards table that once belonged to Harry Houdini. To entertain family and guests, Mr. Copperfield said he designs treasure hunts and other “adventures.” Right now he is completing a “secret jungle village,” where monkeys roam, accessed by a hidden staircase and underground passageway.

“If you were a magician who told a lot of stories through his magic, what would you do if you had islands?” he said. “You’d do secret passages, secret villages, statues that rise out of the ground.”